Monday, November 11, 2013

Reflektions

I decided to try and squelch some of my more ADD tendencies,
so I shut off all outside distraction, turned the lights down, and got to
listening to the new Arcade Fire album while perched on my bed. Letting my mind
wander, I started to pick up subtle nuances as the album developed. The melody
slowly rising and overtaking the struggling Wynn Butler who seems early on in
the album to be at war with the instrumentals, attempting to make his voice
have meaning over the cacophony of sound. I thought to myself the lay out of
this album is masterful, the transitions work beautifully, it builds from start
to finish, just to come all crashing down as the first side ends. But this post
is not about my feelings persay, it’s about the sense of coherence one feels
when listening to an album in its entirety (which I will admit I didn’t even do
since I stopped at the first side, my ADD sometimes always win out.)

Is the feeling of coherence intrinsic to the album itself?
Most musicians and those around music would say definitely. The songs are placed
in their order for some thematic reason that the authors have some privileged
access to. It could be stylistic as in building up tempo, or it could be
thematic as in many of the Killers’ early albums, taking you through a journey
of pain and loss, ending on a bitter and exhausted note. What if a band such as
Arcade Fire were to generate 40 songs and then dump them on their label who
then have the job of ordering and building up a theme? Would the coherence one
may feel from this be less valid than the coherence one feels from an album
constructed coherently by the author? Do creation and construction live in
separate realms?

To understand this question, one must look from where
coherence comes from. For all the best laid plans a band has, people are fickle with
regards to feeling how you want them to. The coherence of theme may be lost for
the coherence of melody and tempo. In fact, single songs are sometimes put into
coherent narratives by our own personal coherence generating mechanism, our
brains. Many people experience the feeling of having their Ipod on shuffle, or
listening to the radio, and that perfect song coming on at just the right
moment. The song order was fundamentally random with no underlying structure,
yet you the observer felt some deeper meaning in the songs arrival in your
personal arc. In fact, many people hope to discover new connections in their
music repertoire with external coherence generating mechanisms, such as ITunes
Genius and Pandora. These systems attempt to synthesize an underlying coherence
of the listener’s music tastes and map them onto either new or already existing
songs within the listener’s repertoire.

Now it seems that I have come to divide creation and
construction as two separate realms, in that construction can be reconstruction
by the observers, the consumers of music. But this same reconstructing of
narratives that listeners do, is the same sort of reconstruction bands do as
they are creating albums, and songs. The tempo, notes, and beats of stanzas are
constantly being morphed, blended, discarded, folded into larger themes,
melodies, cadences of songs, which are then recombined, spliced, manipulated,
lengthened into full-fledged albums with their own arcs, narratives and
meta-structures. But is this process linear, does it build from stanza, to song
to album without any feedback between these interlocking steps?

Music occupies a particular human world of creative
expression. Though it is unique, it falls within the realm of human cognition
and I think the answer to this quandary may lie there. A simple analogy to the
process of language production may be illuminating. Whenever one blurts out
something to their friend about how grand their day was, what comes first the
meaning of the message or the content used to convey said meaning? Many people
instinctively say that meaning comes first, for without the meaning, why would
we express that particular phrase? But if the meaning came first, what language
was the meaning in? If it was in English, then isn’t the meaning already in
words, so where did the words come from to give to the meaning. Many
researchers have come down on the side of the co-relationship between meaning
and content. Both simultaneously constrain one another.

The vocabulary we have
at our disposal affects the meanings that we express and vice versa. There’s a
reason people who speak more than one language often talk about thinking, or
reasoning in another language so as to resolve some problem. Linguistic
constraints beget reasoning constraints (Dennett, 247). Oliver Sachs has a
wonderful, reporting of the constraining aspects of linguistic mediums:

“Communication by motor behavior became a very important
part of the transference…[W]ithout knowing it, I was receiving two sets of
communication simultaneously: one in words, a form in which the patient
ordinarily communicated with me; the other in gestures [signs], as the patient
used to communicate with his father. At other times in the transference, the
motor symbols represented a gloss upon the verbal text the patient was
communicating. These motor symbols contained additional material which either
augmented or more likely contradicted what was being communicated verbally. In
a sense, “unconscious material” was making its appearance in consciousness by
way of motor rather by way of verbal communication (Sachs, 34).”

Transference is a bit much for me, but it is clear that the mode
with which reasoning is articulated and rehearsed affects the thoughts that are
produced. Verbal and motor communicative structures are different and can
construct thoughts in ways that are sometimes at odds. The abacus and
calculator are two different methods for the same goal “calculation”, yet the
mechanisms used and results generated can diverge.

This same sort of feedback between meaning and
content can be seen in the relationships between albums, songs, and their
listeners. While the artist may be developing the album, the album is also
being particularized in songs, and once those songs are developed they
themselves determine where the album is going. This is why outlining is such an
important part in the writing process. For all the jumbles in one’s heads, an
outline helps to particularize and focus those disparate connections into some
sequential process. Once the album is created, the meaning of the artist is now
supplanted by the meaning of the listener. The listener brings in their own personal
narrative, but those are themselves constrained by the content of the album.
There is a reason people do not usually feel particularly sad listening to a
Katy Perry album, the content to derive that meaning is not there. The
construction/creation divide (or more generally the form/content divide) is
less a divide and more of an ecosystem of production that highlights the multilayered
process of reasoning. -----------------------------------------------------------References:Dennett, D. Unconcsiousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company: Boston. 1991.Sachs, O. Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf. Harper Collins: New York. 1990.